The Chocolate Tasting went quite well. I discovered that my new favorite chocolate is Dolfin Hot Masala Milk Chocolate. My least favorite was the Dark Chocolate with Pink Peppercorns from the same company (who wouldn't thunk that chocolate and peppercorns don't go together?).

So we had all that fun, plus sitting on the deck and then porch sitting at Davidde's. Then Mr. and Mrs. W announced their triumphal return to Detroit (scheduled for June 1). So everything was all fluffy and pink, yes?

No! Sarah gave me a ride home from Davidde's. We then sat in the car in the driveway for a few minutes, discussing student loans and the like. While we were talking, two cars pulled up in front of my house. Keep in mind, of course, that there is only woods across the street from me and my neighbors are pretty far away. So this was directly in front of my house, 10 yards from the bedroom in which Leo was peacefully sleeping. One car parked, the driver got out of the car, hopped into the waiting SUV and the SUV took off.

Sarah and I thought that was pretty odd, as no one would have any call to park a car in front of my house on my tiny dirt road except to visit me, which they did not. So she turned her car around to get a look at the parked car. It seemed to have the back window down. Odd. She pulled along side of the car to get a better look then suggested we get out of the car to see. I had spent the evening bragging about "how I could handle myself just fine if I was sent to jail" (I don't really know how that topic came up or why I was so confident in my jail survival skills, but that was what I had been saying only hours earlier). Unfortunately, my beer induced bravado was just that and I was even too chicken to look closely at the car parked in front of my house. Sarah stuck her head inside. She didn't see anything significant but she said it smelled heavily of smoke.

I decided that I would call the police station when I went inside, just to say that a "suspicious" car was parked outside my house. I checked to make sure that Leo wasn't hacked to bits (he wasn't) and came back outside to say goodnight to Sarah. I was going to call the police, but the only after hours number listed was 911. I have spent my entire childhood being warned to never call 911 unless it is an emergency. Was this an emergency? No. In fact, I suspected that I would just sound crazy when I called the police to report that a "suspicious" car was parked outside of my house. So I went back and forth about this for a bit, decided to see what the morning brought (hopefully the scary car would be gone) and I went to bed.

The car was still there in the morning. Leo went out to look at it and reported that two windows were missing and the steering column had been broken into and the car had been hot wired. So he called 911. A cop (a really, really cute cop I might add) showed up about 10 minutes later. He ran the plates, but the car hadn't been reported stolen yet. He found some pot inside the car, and a bit of brick was stuck inside the door handle where the car had apparently run into a brick wall. The cop said the car had indeed been stolen and he hauled it away in a wrecker. He also admonished me for not having called 911 the night before.

So Sarah and I had been 20 feet away from car thieves on a dark street at 1:30 in the morning! We were just having a silly conversation about finances and real, live criminals were just paces away.

Not only do I feel much less confident in the safety of my neighborhood, I learned that 911 is not just for emergencies. Who knew? But there were more questions generated from this incident than answers. Why can't the police department have a regular after hours phone line? Who is to say that our call about the car didn't prevent someone with a real emergency from getting through? Why doesn't the police department come out with a scantily clad cop calendar if they are so darn cute?